Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

1. Feminist scholarship on testimony and witness is disciplinarily, geographically, and politically diverse and it is beyond the scope of this project to catalog it; however, some key texts that inform the theorization of race, gender, doubt, and ethics in this study include Kathryn Abrams and Irene Kacandes, eds., WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Special Issue on “Witness” 36, no. 1–2 (2008); Wendy Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); and Sidonie Smith and Kay Shaeffer, Human Rights and Narrative Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Work that focuses on trauma and testimony associated with the subaltern, the geographical and historical contexts of the global South, and the politics of decolonialization includes Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Interdisciplinary studies of race that consider the historical impact of slavery on American institutions and everyday life supply the analytical grounding for reading literary testimony as a cultural process connected to how publics engage with race, gender, truth-telling, doubt, and justice and include Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (July 1991): 1242–99; Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

2. See, too, how Gillian Whitlock’s notion of “testimonial transactions” (Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions [New York: Oxford University Press, 2015]) and Rosanne Kennedy’s “moving testimony” (“Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere,” in Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, 51–78 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014]) seek to characterize and trace the movement of testimony across contexts and audiences.

3. Note here how the Fifth Amendment acknowledges the need to balance the right against self-incrimination against the need to hear testimony from those who would incriminate themselves in the process of testifying. Granting immunity in exchange for self-incriminating testimony represents a form of testimonial transaction. Testimony has its own agency under these conditions because immunity protects testimony from its association with a compromised witness and enables testimony to possess a credibility in court that the witness who offers it does not have.

4. This is very much in line with Lauren Berlant’s theorization of impersonality developed in Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011) and addressed again in an interview with Dana Luciano in Social Text (2013), http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano/. Berlant captures how events that one cannot help but experience as personal arise from the impersonal forces of accidents, other people’s motives, institutional norms, and so on. Berlant offers a new way to think about the critical error through which blameworthiness, including self-blame, takes hold.

5. I am thinking of stickiness in a different, but allied, way as Sara Ahmed uses the term with reference to how racism attaches to black bodies (The Cultural Politics of Emotion [New York: Routledge, 2005]). Another allied way of thinking about bodies as bearing evidence they cannot fully control is offered by Gayle Salamon (Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010]) who analyzes how the felt sense of gendered embodiment travels in relation to various forms of cultural judgment about it.

6. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1971), 109.

7. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 44.

8. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 16.

9. See ibid. Reddy analyzes the legal and cultural accumulation of racism and sexism as “amending” citizenship.

10. The phrase is Lauren Berlant’s from The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. For critical narratives of how racism and sexism shape intimate publics, see also Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 459–68; Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; and Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015).

11. See the “human rights and narrated lives” paradigm developed by Smith and Schaeffer, Human Rights and Narrative Lives, that accounts for the significance and circulation of life stories in relation to human rights.

12. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

13. For an analysis of victim blaming as a large-scale cultural politics, see Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War on Women (New York: Crown, 1991), written during the period I study here, which argues that women’s outrage at Anita Hill’s treatment helped to spur the massive prochoice demonstration in 1992, but that women’s “political awakening provoked instant political reprisal” (xi). For analysis of victim blaming, see Michelle L. Meloy and Susan L. Miller, The Victimization of Women: Law, Policies, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–5, which traces how women victims are associated with responsibility for the crimes men commit against them.

14. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Berlant, The Female Complaint; Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

15. Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, eds., Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

16. See Berlant’s notion of “juxtapolitical” reading in The Female Complaint, 155.

17. See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; and Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality.”

18. See Raymond Williams’s discussion in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 9, 128ff., in which he connects an affective history to the structures of lived experience.

19. See Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s critical field guide to life writing, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and related work on human rights narratives by Schaeffer and Smith (Human Rights and Narrative Lives); Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

20. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

21. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).

22. See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

23. See Leigh Gilmore, “Learning from Fakes: Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre,” in Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, ed. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, 21–35 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Leigh Gilmore, “Boom/lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29, no. 2 (2014): 211–24.

24. Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting is apposite here; see her Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See Reddy, Freedom with Violence, for a critical narrative of how racist histories of law and violence persist in contemporary notions and enactments of freedom.

25. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 133.

26. Time magazine, October 21, 1991.

27. I echo here Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born woman, but rather becomes a woman.”

28. Anita Miller, ed. The Complete Transcripts of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill Hearings: October 11, 12, 13, 1991 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1994), 89.

29. See Jon Krakauer’s account of rape culture in Missoula, Montana: Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (New York: Doubleday, 2015). Krakauer’s account focuses on white male criminals, but the association of black masculinity, sexuality, and criminality is well studied in criminology and media studies. The racial logics of “boys will be boys” asserts that white male aggression is natural and permissible while black male violence, actual and falsely conjured, is animalistic and criminal.

30. Jon Krakauer (Missoula) makes a key point about rape and doubt. Women lie about rape in the same percentage that all people lie about all crimes (2–10%). But police and others presume all women to be lying about all rape. Commenting specifically on the retracted Rolling Stone article about a gang rape in a fraternity, Krakauer said: “The overwhelming majority, you know, of victims do not lie about rape. I mean, there’s this mythology out there that women lie about being raped. In fact, some women do lie about being raped—between 2 and 10 percent is the best research. Many studies show this. So it’s really a small amount. It’s not too different from other crimes. The difference is in other crimes the victim isn’t assumed to be lying…the way rape victims are treated is different than any other crime” (NPR Staff, “Jon Krakauer Tells a ‘Depressingly Typical’ Story of College Town Rapes,” NPR, April 19, 2015, http://www.npr.org/2015/04/19/400185648/jon-krakauer-tells-a-depressingly-typical-story-of-college-town-rapes).

31. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64; and bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992, 120).

32. Peter Brook, Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1998).

33. See Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 260.

34. Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time (New York: Penguin, 2007); Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Knopf, 2009).

35. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).

36. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004); Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

1. Toni Morrison emphasizes the profusion of speech during the nomination process in “Friday on the Potomac,” in Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1993), viii–ix.

2. Anita Miller, ed., The Complete Transcripts of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill Hearings: October 11, 12, 13, 1991 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1994), 118.

3. On the elements of haunting especially relevant to the presence of histories of racial violence, slavery, gender, and law in the United States, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63–65.

4. Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 139.

5. Miller, Complete Transcripts, 71.

6. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63.

7. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation by legally excluding African Americans from nearly all the privileges of citizenship achieved after the Civil War. Jim Crow effectively restricted voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries and civic amenities like libraries, parks, swimming pools, and public beaches, and enforced second-class citizenship by requiring black citizens to enter through separate doors, use separate washrooms and drinking fountains, and be sworn in using separate Bibles in court. Schools and health care were segregated. Jim Crow legalized and regulated Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling in Dred Scott (1857): a Negro “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

8. In his self-described hatchet job, The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story (New York: Free Press, 1993), David Brock misrepresented every gap in the testimony against Thomas into an intentional lie and hurled at Hill every possible accusation he was fed by the Thomas team as if it were research. He later recanted, and has described the combination of feckless zeal on his part and over-the-top political character assassination, on the part of Thomas supporters that encouraged him to concoct utter falsehoods about Hill’s testimony and also Thomas’s character and actions. It should be noted that Brock lied plenty about Thomas, too, as the fabrication of a nefarious Hill was tied to the fabrication of an idealized Thomas. Brock details how he was fed false information during and after the hearings (though he claims not to have known it at the time and even doubts it would have dissuaded him) and, as a result of undertaking a similar smear of Hillary Clinton, has recanted his previous publications (Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative [New York: Three Rivers Press 2003], 107–9). He identifies himself as the coiner of “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (Blinded, 109).

9. See Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Jeffrey Toobin, “Unforgiven,” New Yorker, November 12, 2007, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/12/unforgiven; Hendrik Hertzberg, “Leaks, Lies and the Law,” Washington Post, December 1, 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/12/01/leaks-lies-and-the-law/871a0b36-a52c-46c5–8632–9fca4ac039eb; Hertzberg, “A Cold Case,” New Yorker, August 12, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/news/hendrik-hertzberg/a-cold-case; Morrison, “Friday on the Potomac”; Amy Richards and Cynthia Greenberg, I Still Believe Anita Hill: Three Generations Discuss the Legacies of Speaking Truth to Power (New York: Feminist Press, 2013); Jane Flax, The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).

10. See excellent compilations of feminist views in Morrison, “Friday on the Potomac,” and Richards and Greenberg, I Still Believe Anita Hill.

11. At the time of the hearing, 41 percent of persons polled believed Thomas and 27 percent believed Hill. This was during a period of intensive campaigning against her in which falsehoods and innuendo were presented as fact. In 1993, after the publication of The Selling of Clarence Thomas, the percentage shifted.

12. Thomas confirms and elaborates this strategy in his memoir published fifteen years after his confirmation: My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

13. As Nina Totenberg explains, following Bork’s failed confirmation in which he detailed his conservative views at length, Thomas denied any such views whatsoever. On such landmark cases as Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 abortion ruling, that occurred while Thomas was in law school and which could reasonably be expected to draw his interest, Thomas denied ever discussing it and asserted he had no view whatsoever. Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy was incredulous: “You’re not suggesting that there wasn’t any discussion at any time of Roe v. Wade?” Thomas demurred: “I cannot remember personally engaging in those discussions.” According to Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman: “Most people had trouble believing that someone who had been to Yale Law School [and] had spent a public career in jobs connected to law, could possibly have no opinion on the most controversial legal topics of his generation.” The twist was that Thomas’s outright refusal to engage was read as strategy rather than lying. Feldman observes: “And yet somehow those answers not only did not stand in the way of Justice Thomas’ confirmation, but were seen in some way as good politics.” Nina Totenberg, “Thomas Confirmation Hearings Had Ripple Effect,” NPR, October 11, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/10/11/141213260/thomas-confirmation-hearings-had-ripple-effect.

14. Robert Bork’s nomination hearings were so politically divided that the strategy of sinking a candidate on his or her actual jurisprudence and ideology came to be known as “borking.”

15. According to Mayer and Abramson, “Thomas’s grandfather was an active member of the NAACP; at one point he was dubbed a ‘sharpshooter’ for the effectiveness of the boycotts he lead against white businesses that wouldn’t hire blacks” (Strange Justice, 43).

17. Lani Guinier, “But Some of Us Are Brave,” in I Still Believe Anita Hill: Three Generations Discuss the Legacies of Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Amy Richards and Cynthia Greenberg (New York: Feminist Press, 2013).

20. Quoted in Hill, Speaking Truth to Power, 131.

21. Miller, Complete Transcripts.

22. See Hendrik Hertzberg’s writing on the conspiracy claim. Hertzberg wrote in the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section (“Leaks, Lies and the Law”) and again in the New Yorker (“A Cold Case”) that “if Thomas and his supporters were speaking the truth, then not only he but also the entire nation were being victimized by a monstrous plot to use perjured testimony in order to undermine a solemn process mandated by the Constitution itself—and, thereby, to alter the course of American government for decades to come. A considerable number of people would necessarily have committed serious crimes in furtherance of this plot, beginning, of course, with Anita Hill herself…. It would have been a simple matter to collect the evidence from e-mail and telephone records and from the testimony, immunized and compelled if necessary, of her co-conspirators and other witnesses. Nothing of the kind happened, of course…. From Thomas’s supporters, there were no calls for a special prosecutor, no demands to bring in the F.B.I., no expressions of outrage that Hill and the other plotters were being permitted to get away scot-free, no attempts to uphold the rule of law and the Constitutional order by ensuring that the guilty were indicted, tried, and imprisoned for their crimes” (Hertzberg, “A Cold Case”).

23. See Hertzberg, “A Cold Case.”

24. Kate Phillips, “Biden and Anita Hill, Revisited,” New York Times blog, August 23, 2008, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/biden-and-anita-hill-revisited.

25. Angela Wright was prepared to testify that she dated Thomas at his importuning when she worked for him. Thomas’s team worked to minimize the damage she could do, including providing her a letter of recommendation that presented her firing by Thomas as her decision to move on and seek other professional opportunities. Lest this be interpreted as something other than an implied quid pro quo for her continued silence, Thomas’s aide was explicit about the link. As to Biden’s claims that Wright was not prepared to testify, court records indicate otherwise: she waited without being called.

26. Phillips, “Biden and Anita Hill.”

27. At one point during the questioning, Senator Alan Simpson brandished a stack a papers while referencing “the faxes” he had received about Hill. Mayer and Abramson describe this as purposeful deception with Simpson using a prop, basically, to conjure the image of concerned citizens informing on Hill (Strange Justice, 314).

28. Brock, Blinded by the Right, 107.

29. Mayer and Abramson, Strange Justice, 314–16.

32. The office of the public prosecutor in the United States emerged with the founding of the nation and is engrained in legal training and practice. See Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–5.

33. As I write this chapter, the United States is gripped by a series of murders of unarmed African Americans pursued by white racist actions. A number of these killings have occurred as police officers seek and escalate conflict into one-sided violence: from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Eric Garner in the Bronx to Freddie Gray in Baltimore to Sandra Bland in Texas. The legal protections offered to police (access to weapons, forms of impunity for their actions, protection of police by police) were exploited during Jim Crow in the South. This history is not past, but is part of a continuation, as Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and others argue, of racial violence in the post–civil rights era.

34. Morrison, “Friday on the Potomac,” xvi.

35. See Kendall Thomas, “Strange Fruit” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice, 364–89.

36. Scholars testify to the power of watching the hearings. See, for example, Flax, The American Dream in Black and White, 3.

37. “Kendall Thomas by Lynn Tillman,” an interview in BOMB: Artists in Conversation 59 (Spring 1997), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2059/kendall-thomas.

38. Joseph Biden ruled two areas of questioning off limits: Thomas’s qualifications for the court and corroboration of Hill’s report on his pornography use. When the American Bar Association rated Thomas “qualified,” Biden was concerned that further questioning would appear as ganging up on a black man, so no line of questioning regarding his qualifications was permitted. Nor would Biden question Thomas on pornography and its centrality to Hill’s testimony, for similar reasons. Thus the confirmation hearings were permitted under Biden to proceed exactly as orchestrated for years: a fait accompli to place a young conservative vote on the court. See Mayer and Abramson, Strange Justice, on how Biden has defended his role in the hearings. He suppressed evidence about sexual harassment through a claim to uphold decency standards and failed to press Thomas on his legal thinking and conservative politics out of racial deference. Biden told Mayer and Abramson he felt this deference was “misplaced.”

39. Anita Faye Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan, Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill–Thomas Hearings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 273.

40. Feminists have fully critiqued the existence of a private sphere outside law and contract as a false notion (Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract [Cambridge: Polity, 1988]). The private/public spheres suggest a false balance, as does the he said/she said pairing. The notion that there is a separate private sphere obscures the legal extension of male rule and privilege beyond the public sphere of citizenship in Athens and into the household. Thus the public/private split is not a split at all but an extension of the rights of the father to exercise law over the inhabitants of the household who lack any footing in the polis (women, slaves, children, nonhuman animals). Hence the notion that men’s territorial, aggressive, and proprietary sexual conduct is “private,” and that criticism of it is a violation of privacy.

41. Allen, World of Prometheus, 51.

42. Mayer and Abramson, Strange Justice, 7.

44. Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son, 280.

45. Toobin, “Unforgiven.”

46. See Hill, Speaking Truth to Power; Hill and Jordan, Race, Gender, and Power in America; Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son; and Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, directed by Freida Mock (First Run Features, 2013).

47. Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son, 244.

51. Ibid., 171, 179.

53. Mayer and Abramson, Strange Justice, 60.

54. Hill, Speaking Truth to Power, 187.

55. “The Thomas Hearings: Excerpts from Senate’s Hearings on the Thomas Nomination,” New York Times, September 13, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/13/us/the-thomas-hearings-excerpts-from-senate-s-hearing-on-the-thomas-nomination.xhtml.

56. Linda Greenhouse, “Clarence Thomas, Silent but Sure,” Opinionator, New York Times, March 11, 2010, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/.

57. Totenberg, “Thomas Confirmation Hearings Had Ripple Effect.”

60. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 180.

61. Morrison, “Friday on the Potomac,” x.

1. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (New York: Verso, 1984).

2. John Beverly’s definition of testimonio informs the debate about genre and truth telling. See his Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

3. See Greg Grandin, “It Was Heaven That They Burned: Who Is Rigoberta Menchú?” Nation, September 8, 2010, http://www.thenation.com/article/it-was-heaven-they-burned.

4. Ibid. The controversy was covered comprehensively in essays collected by Arturo Arias in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). See also Greg Grandin, Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology/Community Institute for Transcultural Exchange, “Rigoberta Menchu Debates, Redux,” Osea-cite.org, n.d., http://www.osea-cite.org/history/redux_rigoberta-menchu-debate.php; James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 156–59.

5. Dinesh D’Souza, “Liar, Rigoberta Menchú,” Boundless, 1999, http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0000074.cfm.

6. Grandin, “It Was Heaven That They Burned.”

7. In 1999 Juan Jesús Aznárez, in an interview with Menchú, offered these numbers: “100,000 people dead, 40,000 disappeared, 200,000 orphans, and a wandering legion of 100,000 widows” (Rigoberta Menchú, “Those Who Attack Me Humiliate the Victims,” an interview with Juan Jesús Aznárez, January 24, 1999, in Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 109). Most current sources place the number at over 200,000 killed (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/latin_america-jan-june11-timeline_03–07/).

9. David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). Challenges emerge from political scientists, historians, and anthropologists, in addition to political activists. See, for example, Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Julieta Rostica, “The Naturalization of Peace and War: The Hegemonic Discourses on the Political Violence in Guatemala,” in The Struggle for Memory in Latin America: Recent History and Political Violence, 183–201, ed. Eugenia Allier-Montaño and Emilio Crenzel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Grandin, “It Was Heaven That They Burned.”

10. See Menchú, “Those Who Attack Me Humiliate the Victims,” 109–20, for Menchú’s immediate disputation of Stoll’s assertions and the New York Times story. The Times did not report her response.

11. Dante Liano, “The Anthropologist with the Old Hat,” in Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 123.

12. Larry Rohter, “Tarnished Laureate: A Special Report: Nobel Winner Finds Her Story Challenged,” New York Times, December 15, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/15/world/tarnished-laureate-a-special-report-nobel-winner-finds-her-story-challenged.xhtml.

13. Liano, “The Anthropologist with the Old Hat,” 123, 124.

14. Ibid., 124. Stoll’s methodology has been assessed by anthropologists, though it was not reported on as his claims against Menchú circulated in global media. Stoll interviewed 120 people, many of whom gave hearsay accounts of Menchú, and created a story from the interviewees who supported his views. See also Kay B. Warren’s comment in “Telling Truths: Taking David Stoll and the Rigoberto Menchú Exposé Seriously,” in Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 208: “Stoll’s dominant focus is on the facts so as to question the veracity of the testimonial account. What more could there be? Not much if one accepts this framing. But this is where Stoll chooses a distinctive path from ethnographers who are interested in the cultural and social contexts of their informants’ lives and portrayals as in the particular facts they provide” (emphasis in original).

15. Menchú, “Those Who Attack Me Humiliate the Victims,” 111.

16. “Efrain Rios Montt and Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez: Background,” International Justice Monitor, n.d., http://www.ijmonitor.org/efrain-rios-montt-and-mauricio-rodriguez-sanchez-background.

17. According to Arturo Taracena in an interview with Luis Aceituno for El períodico de Guatemala, Guatemala City, on January 3, 1999, Burgos-Debray was interested in publishing a testimony by a Guatemalan Mayan woman after the idea was suggested to her by a Canadian friend. The status of Burgos-Debray’s “ownership” of the interview continues to be controversial. See dialogue between Greg Grandin and David Stoll following Grandin’s article in the Nation (2010). Grandin describes how the publisher, Verso Books, rejected his preface to a new edition of I, Rigoberta Menchú when rights-holder Burgos-Debray objected. Grandin comments: “Subsequently, I have learned that Burgos has kept all of the money/royalties from all editions since the early 1990s—a fact rarely mentioned in all the commentary on Menchú. This was confirmed by both Gallimard publishers (which acknowledges that Burgos is the legal ‘author’ of the book) and Burgos herself—in an email she admitted that she kept all the money since the 1990s, saying that ‘si vous souhaitez faire votre promotion de faiseur de vendettas personnelles, je serais heureuse d’expliquer à l’occasion pourquoi j’ai cessé l’envoie des droits d’auteur….’ It no doubt takes a life steeped in the excitements of the international left to summon such drama to a simple query, but there it is. Considering the early 90s forward was the period when the book really took off in sales, this must be a considerable amount of money. I’m not especially politically correct, and have always thought that defenses of Menchú’s memoir based on her position—that is, as an indigenous woman with claims to ways of knowing or speaking distinct from colonial knowledge—came up short. Yet this particular perverse arrangement does say something about the international division of labor. Menchú, having barely escaped unimaginable terror to live with unbearable sorrow, got the opprobrium, while someone else, living far away, got the cash.” Grandin, “Rigoberta Menchu Debates, Redux” (emphasis and formatting in original).

18. For an account of this process, see Arturo Taracena’s interview: Luis Aceituno, “Arturo Taracena Breaks His Silence,” in Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 82–94.

19. Quoted in Grandin, “It Was Heaven That They Burned.”

20. Aceituno, “Arturo Taracena Breaks His Silence,” 84.

22. Grandin, “It Was Heaven That They Burned.”

24. Beverly, Against Literature; John Beverly, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Doris Sommer, “Las Casas’s Lies and Other Language Games,” in Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 237–50.

25. Pamela Yates, “Trial on Guatemala’s Spanish Embassy Resumes Today: The Rest of History,” NACLA.org, January 19, 2015, https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/19/trial-guatemala%E2%80%99s-spanish-embassy-fire-resumes-today-rest-history-video.

26. Pamela Yates, Granito: How To Nail a Dictator, Skylight.is, n.d., http://skylight.is/films/granito.

27. Pamela Yates, Dictator in the Dock, Skylight.is, n.d., http://skylight.is/films/dictator-in-the-dock.

28. Skylight filmed the entire genocide trial of Ríos Montt from the day it started on March 19, 2013, to its conclusion on May 10, 2013, when Riós Montt was found guilty. Although the verdict was overturned and the key judge and prosecutor (both women) were dismissed on technicalities, the fact of the trial and the verdict were unprecedented and profoundly meaningful.

29. Yates, Dictator in the Dock.

30. Ibid. Another spin-off project, Granito: Every Memory Matters, is the companion project to How to Nail a Dictator. It is a multimedia, multiplatform project meant to make young people in Guatemala who did not live through the genocide and do not remember it aware, and to awaken memory in the elders (https://vimeo.com/28082375). The documentary archive that developed around Menchú was instrumental in court, and also an example of restorative justice via the means Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “visual activism,” in which “artists, academics, community groups and many others…are linking visible online presence to real-world interventions to create social change.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Nicholas Mirzoeff on the Real Impact of Sharing 700 Million Snapchats Every Day,” It’s Nice That, June 4, 2015, http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/nicholas-mirzoeff.

31. See Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaeffer’s framework of human rights and narrated lives (Human Rights and Narrative Lives [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004]), and Gillian Whitlock’s testimonial transactions (Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions [New York: Oxford University Press, 2015]).

32. Arjun Appaduri, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appaduri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.

33. I have written on this previously: Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

34. I take “forum of judgment” as my definition of jurisdiction from Peter Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1. I use memoir to refer to autobiographical texts that make a claim to historical accuracy and constrain their focus to a particular set of events, duration of time, relationship of interest, or some other specifiable focus within the broader purview of the genre of autobiography. Memoir’s typical evidence is memory, though it may incorporate more documentary materials. I use testimonio to refer to testimonial literature that offers first-person accounts of historical and political struggle in which it is not the sovereign subject of universalism but the resistant subject who speaks. For this usage, I draw on Beverley, Against Literature, and Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 115–38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). I concur with Julie Rak that these terms do double and triple duty in the field and the histories of these terms do not fully register in the current omnibus usage life narrative (Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market [Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013]).

35. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.

36. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

37. Jürgen Habermas describes the public sphere as “a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public” (Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989], 231). Critiques of Habermas’s definition of the public sphere that examine the ambiguities of intimacy and privacy, often under the rubric of “publics,” “intimate publics,” or “counterpublics,” have deepened and historicized more fully the complexities that attend any use or enactment of “public” and “private.” See, e.g., Berlant, The Female Complaint, and Noëlle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).

38. Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, trans. James Hurley, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000).

39. Richard Ford, “Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction),” Michigan Law Review 97, no. 4 (1999): 843.

41. Holloway Sparks offers a crisp definition of dissent as “the public contestation of prevailing arrangements of power by marginalized citizens through oppositional, democratic, noninstitutionalized practices that augment or replace institutionalized channels of democratic opposition when those channels are inadequate or unavailable” (Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12, no. 4 [1997]: 83–84).

42. Nancy K. Miller, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.

43. See David Horowitz, “I, Rigoberta Menchú, Liar,” FrontPageMagazine.com, February 26, 1999, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24278; D’Souza, “Liar.”

44. David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 70. In some interviews Stoll withholds this epithet, although other critics of Menchú do not.

45. As Arturo Arias argues, “David Stoll finds her, on the one hand, not Western enough when it comes to the rigor of her logic and her use of facts. He thus accuses her of invention, of fibbing. On the other hand, he finds her too Western in her politics, and he therefore claims that her ideas are not representative of what he judges to be authentic ‘native’ Mayan thought” (Arturo Arias, “Authorizing Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self,” PMLA 116, no. 1 [2001], 75).

46. Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 79.

47. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).

1. See Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Julie Rak, Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Warterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013).

2. Berlant’s work across several major books has transformed the understanding of what Habermas theorizes as the public sphere and Benedict Anderson analyzes as imagined communities by theorizing how the gender-sexuality-citizenship-affect nexus works in popular culture and intimate life and is rooted in the form of the nation.

3. See my description of the emergence of a “boom/lash” in Leigh Gilmore, “Boom/lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29, no. 2 (2014): 211–24.

4. See Julie Rak’s parsing of scholarly accounts of the popularity of memoir (including Gilmore, Miller, and Couser). See, too, Rak’s account of the rise in a popular readership for nonfiction as cause (Boom!, 6–12).

5. Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Vintage, 1993); Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1995); Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (New York: Scribner, 1996).

6. For documentation of the memoir boom, see Leigh Gilmore, “Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity,” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 128–39. See Rak, Boom!, for a case study of bookstore practices in Canada during the memoir boom.

7. For discussion of how the meaning of the term “memoir” migrated during these years, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 2–6; and Rak, Boom!.

8. Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography.

9. See Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), for an account of innovative women’s comics as life narrative; and Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) for a reading of blogs, journalism, book design, and marketing as significant elements in life narrative.

10. Paul Eakin, for example, organizes a reading of what I call nonnormative life writing around rule breaking (Eakin, Making Selves: How Our Lives Become Stories [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999]). For a study of censorious responses to Kaysen and Harrison, see Elizabeth Marshall, “The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss,” College English 66, no. 4 (March 2004): 395–418.

11. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), for the soul-crushing consequences of the demand within neoliberalism to transform human experience into capital.

12. I follow Lauren Berlant, whose analysis of sentimentality and intimate publics describes the consumption of what I call neoliberal life narrative and the identification of a gendered audience for these narratives. Elizabeth Gilbert, whose Eat, Pray, Love marks an important moment in the formation of neoliberal life narrative, genders the target audience as female.

13. Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2005).

14. For the publishing and marketing history of The Glass Castle, see Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing Adolescence and Knowledge in David Smalls’s Stitches: A Memoir,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 35, no. 1 (2013): 16–38.

15. “Jeannette Walls,” Kepplerspeakers.com, n.d., http://www.kepplerspeakers.com/speakers/?speaker=Jeannette%20Walls.

16. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Random House, 1969); Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1976); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (New York: Crossing Press, 1982); Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios (Brooklyn: Sound End Press, 1983); Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (London: Persephone Press, 1981); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).

17. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986); Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. Peter Owen (New York: Avon, 1975). See Hillary Chute’s related and relevant historicization of women’s life narrative in comics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Lynda Barry’s “autobiofictionalography” One!Hundred!Demons (Seattle: Sasquatch Press 2002), Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (Berkeley, Calif.: Frog, 1998) and Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2002), and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008) and graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006) testify to the dynamism of feminism, comics, and life narrative in the period I study and are part of the alternative history of memoir I offer here. See also Kate Douglas’s historicization of published childhood trauma narratives within the 1990s and 2000s in Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

18. Sara Ahmed identifies the predicament of the feminist killjoy as the one at risk of losing her place at the family table At risk of losing her place, at risk if she stays, the feminist killjoy is blamed for the dissonance she unmasks, the dissonance she is. See Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” The Scholar and Feminist Online 8, no. 3 (2010), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/ahmed_01.htm.

19. See Lauren Berlant on the “false distinction between the merely personal and the profoundly structural” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 9.

20. See Elizabeth Gilbert, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and the sorrowing pretexts of their transformation.

21. In contrast, and to tie these examples to my earlier discussion, consider Menchú’s experience of civil war and Anita Hill’s entrapment within Washington politics.

22. Queer studies scholars have shown how neoliberalism absorbs radical formations of gender, sexuality, and race into its own programs, thereby neutralizing their capacity to transform social reality. My analysis is indebted to these insights. Scholars have described how the child, for example, a figure allied with the self-made man I described in chapter 1, is used to compel national morality to uphold and confirm the centrality of guilt and innocence. See Berlant, Queen of America; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Penguin, 1996); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). Queer formations around kinship have been absorbed: Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (New York: Beacon, 2003); Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

23. See, for example, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Jennifer J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

24. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Penguin, 1992); David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991).

25. See Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography.

26. See Gillian Harkins, “Aye, and Neoliberalism,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 7 (2012): 1073–80; Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins, “Genres of Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31, no. 2 (2013): 1–17.

27. A reporter did track down Harrison’s father, who, when questioned, sidestepped a flat-out denial. Warren St. John, “Kathryn Harrison’s Dad Responds to Her Memoir,” New York Observer, April 21, 1997.

28. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), for a feminist analysis of the complexity of claiming injury as a basis of feminist identity or of addressing a plea to the state to provide relief.

29. Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 61, 65, 68–70.

30. Colin Harrison, “Sins of the Father,” Vogue, April 1, 1997.

31. Robert Coles, The Moral Lives of Children (New York: Grover, 1986).

32. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Life with Father: Incestuous and Soul-Deadening,” New York Times, February 27, 1997, C18.

33. Cynthia Crossen, “Know Thy Father,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1997, A16.

34. Robin Pogrebin quoting Paul Bogaards, director of promotion at Knopf, “The Naked Literary Come-On,” New York Times, August 17, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/17/weekinreview/the-naked-literary-come-on.xhtml.

35. Nathan Schneider, “Religious Liberty, Minorities, and Islam: An Interview with Saba Mahmood,” Immanent Frame, August 7, 2011, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/08/17/religious-liberty-minorities-and-islam/

36. Gillian Harkins, Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 215.

37. James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (New York: Random House, 2003); Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (New York: Penguin, 2006); Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato, Calif.: New World Publishing, 1999); Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (New York: Vintage, 2012).

38. Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 5.

39. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1991), 48.

40. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 28.

41. Several insightful scholars have considered this democratization in analyses of Oprah Winfrey’s impact on popular culture, including Cecilia Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005); and Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

42. A foundational text in autobiography studies, Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975) argues that the writer and reader are bound through the guarantee of the autobiographer’s production of historically verifiable truth. Lejeune acknowledges normal stumbling blocks to rendering this truth, including memory and subjectivity, but these essential characteristics of self-consciousness and narrative are subordinate to the contractual definition of genre. In contrast to this view, Judith Butler argues that the limitations on self-knowing, including not simply lapses in memory but the opacities of self-awareness that constitute the psyche and that place violence in relation to the moral self, make such transparency impossible, and further, that it is unethical to construe such an impossibility as the criterion of ethicity. This powerful counterweight to Lejeune’s valuable effort to distinguish autobiography’s specificity would push autobiography studies to contend more seriously with morality, ethics, and violence.

43. I follow many scholars in referring to Oprah Winfrey by her first name, not to indicate an overly familiar or nonscholarly relation to her but to acknowledge that she is best known as “Oprah,” a potent name of her own forging.

44. For an analysis of how Oprah resists and is constrained by racialization, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005). For differing analyses of her place in self-help culture, see Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, and Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2008).

45. Such negotiations around sexism and racism are mediated by stereotype, as described in Collins, Black Sexual Politics, and in Jennifer Harris and Ellwood Watson, eds., The Oprah Phenomenon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007).

46. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Penguin, 2005).

47. Peck, The Age of Oprah, 15.

49. Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, 98–99.

50. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.

52. Tolle, Power of Now, 3–4.

54. Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (New York: Vintage, 2012).

55. “Brave Enough: Cheryl Strayed,” Amazon.com, n.d., http://www.amazon.com/Brave-Enough-Cheryl-Strayed/dp/1101946903.

56. Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things (New York: Penguin, 2013); Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (New York: Penguin, 2015).

57. See Rak’s description of the ends of Frey, who exits the fray calling memoir “bullshit” (Boom!, 14).

1. Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 680.

2. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, trans. L’Association (New York: Pantheon, 2003), appealed to this new literary market. For an analysis of life writing in the post-9/11 global context, see Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

3. Around 2004 the U.S. military began training social scientists to be placed in the field to gain local knowledge. A series of programs, including Human Terrain, involved mixing academically trained civilians into military operations in the global war on terror. See the film and website for Human Terrain, the movie, for a timeline and critical analysis (http://humanterrainmovie.com). Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin receive shared authorship for Three Cups of Tea. Relin is described as a “globe-trotting journalist” in the book’s credits.

4. Jon Krakauer, “Is It Time to Forgive Greg Mortenson?” Daily Beast, April 8, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/08/is-it-time-to-forgive-greg-mortenson.xhtml.

5. Mortenson followed up Three Cups with another “saving girls through education” effort, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Viking, 2009), on which he is sole author but credits two writers for assistance with structure, and Pennies for Peace, a service-learning fundraising project and nonprofit he launched in U.S. schools. Mortenson credits Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko with help in research and structure, respectively.

6. Nicholas Kristof, “Dr. Greg and Afghanistan,” New York Times, October 20, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/opinion/21kristof.xhtml. Thomas Friedman also wrote positive stories in the op-ed pages of the New York Times praising Mortenson’s school-building strategy (“Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.,” New York Times, July 18, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19friedman.xhtml).

7. Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (New York: Anchor, 1997), and Into the Wild (New York: Anchor, 1996). He has shifted to explorations of toxic masculinity in Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (New York: Anchor, 2003) and Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (New York: Doubleday, 2015).

8. Jon Krakauer’s exposé of Mortenson, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way, was initially offered free online for seventy-two hours on byliner.com in April 2011, and a print edition was published by Random House in July 2011. A 60 Minutes story aired April 12, 2011.

9. Associated Press, “‘I Feel Like a Criminal Coming Back’: ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Author Who Lied About Being Kidnapped by the Taliban Returns as Figurehead for Mismanaged Charity,” Daily Mail, September 19, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2760931/Three-Cups-Tea-author-plans-reluctant-return.xhtml.

10. Eun Kyung Kim, “‘Three Cups’ Author Greg Mortenson: ‘I Let a Lot of People Down,’” Today.com, January 21, 2014, reporting on an interview with Tom Brokaw, http://www.today.com/popculture/three-cups-author-greg-mortenson-i-let-lot-people-down-2D11961320.

11. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson elaborate how “metrics of authenticity” arise to help readers navigate the hoaxy terrain where testimony, humanitarian narratives, and frauds coexist. See their “Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony,” Biography 35, no. 4 (2012): 590–626.

12. David Oliver Relin, “Introduction: In Mr. Mortenson’s Orbit,” in Mortenson and Relin, Three Cups of Tea, 5.

13. After the book came under scrutiny, Relin was caught up in the controversy and named in a lawsuit alleging that readers had been duped (a similar lawsuit was filed against James Frey, the publisher offered to refund the cost of the book, and subsequent editions of A Million Little Pieces carry a disclaimer). David Oliver Relin took his life by kneeling on the tracks in front of an oncoming train on November 14, 2012. Within the testimonial network, it is important to remember that some witnesses, like Relin, do not survive long enough for their side of the story to receive an adequate hearing. As controversies erupt, the zeal with which cases are enjoined is hardly consequence free.

14. See Whitlock, Soft Weapons, on how life narratives function as “soft weapons” in the war on terror. Her analysis suggests that the humanitarian hero and proxy witnesses are new devices in the context she analyzes.

15. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 2.

16. See Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 197, on the work certain stories perform within feminism, especially regarding empathy. See also Leela Fernandes, Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power (New York: New York University Press, 2013), on how transnational feminism travels alongside humanitarianism in global markets.

17. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 122.

18. See Gilmore and Marshall, “Girls in Crisis,” on the tendency of “girls in crisis” narratives to avoid focus on women as political agents.

19. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 130.

21. Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 138; Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003); Satrapi, Persepolis.

22. Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall, “Missionary Girl Power: Saving the ‘Third World,’ One Girl at a Time,” Gender and Education 22, no. 3 (2010): 295–311.

23. The durability of this formation into the second decade of the twenty-first century suggests the resilience of the long boom in life narratives, including its capacity to generate ongoing forms of entertainment/education across multiple texts, images, and platforms, as I will show in my discussion of the journalist/activist/adventurer Nicholas Kristof.

24. Hamid Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram, June 1, 2006.

25. Images of women bearing witness often become a visual signature and exemplify the body’s openness to interpretation. A photograph of Anita Hill, one hand on the Bible and the other raised as she is sworn in, is iconic, as is the image of a smiling Rigoberta Menchú facing the gaze of the camera, wearing traditional Mayan dress.

26. Wendy Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Nicholas Mirzoeff on the Real Impact of Sharing 700 Million Snapchats Every Day,” It’s Nice That, June 4, 2015, http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/nicholas-mirzoeff.

27. Kozol, Distant Wars Visible, 57.

28. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.; Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrative Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

29. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 77.

30. Schaeffer and Smith, Human Rights, 31.

31. Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing.

33. Kennedy, “Moving Testimony.”

34. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 78.

35. I have elsewhere argued that neoliberal storytelling is evolving into its own genre. See Leigh Gilmore, “‘What Was I?’ Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive,” Profession (2011): 77–84.

36. Feminist scholarship addressing the unintended negative consequences of neoliberal humanitarianism includes, among others, Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Gilmore and Marshall, “Girls in Crisis”; and Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies,” in Women’s Studies On Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, ed. Robyn Wiegman, 66–81 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

37. See Sensoy and Marshall, “Missionary Girl Power,” for how this phenomenon is remediated in young adult fiction that focuses on humanitarianism, saving the Muslim girl, and girl power.

38. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Knopf, 2009), xxi.

39. In some circumstances, local groups are able to make use of humanitarian work and the resources provided by nongovernmental organizations to further work that they define and to challenge the notion that they need saving. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). See, too, for example, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP, http://awwproject.org) and Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA, http://rawa.org).

40. This is in contrast to truth and reconciliation commissions that address apartheid in South Africa, stolen generations in Australia, and First Nations rights in Canada. All of these aim for national conversations and entail legal outcomes of differing sorts.

41. When Spivak raised the gambit of strategic essentialism in the 1980s, it represented a fraught and canny maneuver. Spivak considered a strategic use of essentialism, not an embrace or even reconsideration of essentialism, as she clarified in an interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson in Boundary 2 20, no. 2 (1993): 24–50.

42. Carol S. Vance, “Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking for Law and Policy,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 2, no. 2 (2012): 208.

43. I rely here on Gayatri Spivak’s formulation, “white men are saving brown women from brown men,” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 297, and the generation of postcolonial feminist criticism it has informed. See also Gilmore and Marshall, “Girls in Crisis,” 685–87, for analysis of this point in Spivak.

1. See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Ballantine, 1975) and the documentary film Rape Culture (Cambridge Documentary Films, prod. Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, 1975). When it emerged, the notion of rape culture exposed marital rape and rape by acquaintances, as well as the broader forms of violence to which women are routinely exposed. In its more recent revival, the term signifies the view that access to women’s sexuality is a male right and privilege and traces the production of that view across multiple sites.

2. In October 2010 members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale University marched through an area of campus where first-year women students live and chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal.” See the recent documentary film The Hunting Ground (dir. Kirby Dick, Weinstein Company, 2015) on sexual assault on campus and a report released in September 2015 on sexual assault on campus that estimates that one in four college women have experienced forced sexual contact.

3. See Estelle B. Friedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

4. I follow the convention of referring to an unproven accusation as an alleged incident. Although the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn was dropped by the Attorney General’s Office in Manhattan Criminal Court, he was found guilty by a preponderance of the evidence in civil court in the Bronx, as this essay details; thus the harm is no longer alleged but proven.

5. For this reason, rape discourse represents a far more serious and pervasive threat to the testimonial dimension of life narrative than hoaxes or fake memoirs do.

6. See Rachel Hall, “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Prevention,” Hypatia 19, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 1–19.

7. See Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrative Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Wendy Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

8. Rob Nixon, “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene,” Presidential Forum, Profession, March 19, 2014, http:/profession.commons.mla.org/2014/03/19/the-great-acceleration-and-the-great-divergence-vulnerability-in-the-anthropocene/

9. Rosanne Kennedy uses the notion of “moving testimony” to describe transnational memory practices. See her case study of Palestinian testimony in the Goldstone Report: Kennedy, “Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere,” in Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 51–78.

10. In addition to very good work done on the complexity of affect, see also the skepticism engendered by the notion that personal stories prompt justice in recent Tanner Lectures given by Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Empathy,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, April 8–10, 2014, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

11. I will move between sympathy and empathy in this chapter. Sympathy, or feeling with, often describes the capacity to imagine oneself in the place of another. Empathy, or feeling one’s way into, often arises from shared experience. Both sympathy and empathy prove difficult to sustain in the encounter with testimony about women’s injuries. It is not because audiences cannot feel sympathy for women who have been harmed or themselves are immune to injury but because the experience many audiences also share and which is persistently reinforced as a response to women’s testimony is doubt. Neither sympathy nor empathy offers secure grounds from which ethical witness will emerge when women testify.

12. I draw here on Erwin Schrödinger’s well-known example of how two contradictory claims are true at the same time. In his example, because it is not possible to know whether a cat in a closed box is alive or dead in the presence of a reactive element, the cat is both dead and alive (potentially) before one opens the box.

13. Patricia J. Williams, “Sex Lies, and the DSK Case,” Nation, August 31, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/sex-lies-and-dsk-case.

14. See Strauss-Kahn’s trial on charges of “aggravated pimping”: Angelique Chrisafis, “Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s ‘Swinging Lifestyle’ Shocks France,” Guardian, February 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/13/france-dominic-strauss-kahn-prostitutes-pimping-trial-lille.

15. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 174.

16. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1991), 169.

17. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, “The Women’s Crusade,” New York Times, August 17, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.xhtml.

18. http://www.halftheskymovement.org.

19. Moira Ferguson and Jamaica Kincaid, “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” Kenyon Review 16, no. 1 (1994): 175.

20. For example, Cathleen Schine’s review, “A World as Cruel as Job’s,” New York Times, February 4, 1996, led with this synopsis: “This is a shocking book. Elegantly and delicately composed, it is also inhuman, and unapologetically so. Jamaica Kincaid has written a truly ugly meditation on life in some of the most beautiful prose we are likely to find in contemporary fiction.”

21. Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Penguin, 1996), 3.

22. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 150.

1. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

2. Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3. I draw this language from Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), which encoded the legal distinction between “races.”

4. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 133.

5. Frances S. Robles, “What Is Known, What Isn’t About Trayvon Martin’s Death,” Miami Herald, March 31, 2012, archived from the original on September 27, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130927021942/http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/31/2725442/what-is-known-what-isnt-about.xhtml.

6. That the destruction of property, congregation of bodies in public space, and the presence of police to control crowds is called “rioting” when people of color are involved, with an especial fascination with “looting,” and something else when crowds of white people are involved has been highlighted in the reporting on post–football game violence and the Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire (2014). In a story covering the postgame mass violence in Columbus, Ohio, that involved police in riot gear and their use of pepper spray and other crowd controlling tactics, the people being controlled (who were lighting cars and other property on fire, and who pulled down the goalposts) were referred to as “revelers.” Andrew Welsh-Huggins, “Ohio State Fans Set Fires, Tear Down Goal Post After Football Win,” Huffington Post, January 13, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/13/ohio-state-football-riot_n_6463620.xhtml.